Home entertainment continues to evolve, and consumption of movies and television content beyond the traditional TV set-top box is no longer a novelty. Video service and content providers continue to expand content offerings and capabilities across devices and screens to attract and retain viewers. Generating on-line and on-demand content consumes many provider resources, while often generating low revenue streams compared to traditional, linear television programming. The low efficiency of on-demand and on-line content generation in traditional systems resulted from very separate workflow for nonlinear content and traditional television. Many broadcasters and content providers operate their playout (transmission of content from the broadcaster into cable networks, broadcast networks, and satellite networks that deliver the content to the audience) and new media (on-demand/online) operations independently. In the past, this approach worked when there were only a few media platforms, but has failed as the volume of on-demand content grew dramatically, with the upsurge of new formats, including cable and satellite video-on-demand (VOD) distribution, owned and syndicated web delivery, mobile device services and DTO/DTR (Download to Own/Rent) media portals.
Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPD) have embraced VOD growth with TV Everywhere, TV Anywhere, TV Anytime, and Catch-Up TV initiatives. These ventures have sought to retain viewers, and maintain revenues, by allowing their audiences to watch their favorite programs through their preferred medium, and at a time that best suits them. Unfortunately, all this growth in VOD content resulted in an overloading of broadcasters' existing on-demand content generation processes.